The Red Line: Pakistan's Two Front War

 When Obama left the White House he stated that the thing that kept him up at night more than anything else was the potential for Pakistan and India to stumble into an unplanned nuclear exchange. What was once a regional conflict has now drawn in a number of great powers such as China, and the US, but no side yet has a real plan to try to avert the risk of this simmering conflict going nuclear. The estimate is that in the event of an Indian invasion toward Islamabad the Pakistani command may only have around 6 hours to either "use or lose" their nuclear weapons, so we ask our panel what the likely outcome will be for this nightmare scenario. On the panel this week. Ayesha Jalal (Tufts University) Adam Weinstein (Foreign Policy) Andrew Small (George Marshall Fund) For more information please visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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The Red Line: Will the Afghan Peace Deal Actually Work?

 The US has now been at war in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and three administrations have all failed to find a solution to this war. Now the clock is ticking, with the Taliban gaining more and more ground every day, and the US risks a second "Rout from Saigon". So the US is looking to a peace deal, but will it actually bring stability to the region or simply further splinter an already expanding civil war. This week's guests are Sahar Khan (CATO) John Glaser (CATO) Jarrett Blanc (Carnegie) For more info visit www.theredlinepodcast.com

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Freakonomics: When Your Safety Becomes My Danger (Ep. 432)

 The families of U.S. troops killed and wounded in Afghanistan are suing several companies that did reconstruction there. Why? These companies, they say, paid the Taliban protection money, which gave them the funding — and opportunity — to attack U.S. soldiers instead. A look at the messy, complicated, and heart-breaking tradeoffs of conflict-zone economies.

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WorldAffairs: America’s Longest War

United States forces have been fighting in Afghanistan for almost twenty years, making it the longest war in American history. But for many Americans, the conflict only became top of mind again after hearing reports that a Russian military intelligence unit offered bounty money to the Taliban for killing US soldiers. In this episode, we take a closer look at how the war in Afghanistan has served as a proxy conflict between the US and Russia and how it fits into Russia’s global agenda. Former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry joins co-host Ray Suarez, followed by a conversation with Jennifer Glasse of Al Jazeera.

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The New York Times: Afghan Town’s First Female Mayor Awaits Her Assassination

Ms. Ghafari is not the first woman to take over a traditionally male job in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. But she has one of the toughest imaginable positions.

Women have been appointed as governors of Daikundi and Bamiyan Provinces, which are culturally tolerant areas by Afghanistan’s standards. For two years, Nili, a town in Daikundi, had a female mayor. She eventually moved to the United States.

But Wardak is a particularly conservative province, where support for the Taliban is so widespread that many major highways are not safe for civilians.

Maidan Shar’s only high school for girls had just 13 graduates last year. Before Ms. Ghafari became mayor, the only woman in town to have held a government job other than teacher was the head of Wardak’s women’s ministry, and she did not dare live in the city, instead residing in Kabul, the country’s capital. Ms. Ghafari also commutes from Kabul for safety reasons. [...]

After she arrived for work that July day, her office was mobbed by angry men brandishing sticks and rocks. She had to be escorted out by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security, which sent a squad of paramilitary officers to her rescue.

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CNN: With the Khashoggi story worsening, the US may finally have an adult in the room

MBS has also variously presided over a disastrous war in Yemen; the blockade of Saudi Arabia's neighbor, Qatar; the de facto temporary kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister; and the incarceration in a luxury hotel in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, of some two hundred businessmen and princes, who had to hand over tens of billions to secure their freedom in what the government described as settlements in an anti-corruption drive.

Astonishingly, given the importance of Saudi Arabia there hasn't ever been a Trump-appointed ambassador in the country. The US-Saudi relationship has therefore been largely an informal one managed by President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, 37, and MBS, 33. [...]

It's hard to think of someone more qualified than Abizaid for the role. Abizaid, aged 67, speaks fluent Arabic and once ran Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for US military actions in the Middle East. This gives him great expertise and experience in the region as well as the gravitas to speak for President Trump. [...]

Jeffrey was one the dozens of signatories of the 'Never Trump' letters by leading Republican national security officials during the 2016 presidential election campaign. In the past, signing such a letter would have torpedoed your chance of serving in a significant role in the administration, but in Jeffrey's case his subject matter expertise has apparently trumped the letter.

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Big Think: Why the wars America starts are unwinnable | Danny Sjursen

Danny Sjursen—a prominent U.S. Army strategist and also a former history instructor at West Point Academy—posits that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't winnable. So... why don't we leave? As he puts it: "We have the inertia of a military-industrial complex, which makes a lot of money for a lot of people and keeps a lot of people employed, on one end, and then we have the sunken cost fallacy on the other side, where we say “We’ve committed so much we can’t possibly leave.” Danny is brought to you today by the Charles Koch Foundation. The Charles Koch Foundation aims to further understanding of how US foreign policy affects American people and societal well-being. Through grants, events, and collaborative partnerships, the Foundation is working to stretch the boundaries of foreign policy research and debate by discussing ideas in strategy, trade, and diplomacy that often go unheeded in the US capital. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org. NOTE: The views expressed in this video are those of the guest speaking in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US government.

The New Yorker: Can Imran Khan Really Reform Pakistan?

Khan’s tiny political party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., expanded rapidly, and it surged in national and provincial elections, ultimately leading a provincial government for a number of years, to mixed reviews. But Khan fell short of winning a high national office and, in recent years, he has largely played a role of opposition agitator and provocateur. Now he appears to be within close reach of his ambition to serve as the Prime Minister. According to results in Pakistan’s general election, held on Wednesday, the P.T.I. won the most seats, by far, in Parliament, although not an absolute majority. The expectation is that Khan will be able to negotiate a majority coalition by attracting support from smaller parties and independent members of parliament. [...]

There can also be little doubt that the office of Prime Minister of Pakistan will remain the country’s second most powerful position, after the Chief of Army Staff, currently held by General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Bajwa and his senior generals exercise authority well beyond their constitutional role, influencing the media, politics, and the judiciary. Their power has only consolidated in recent years, as evidenced in military-sanctioned crackdowns on media outlets critical of the “establishment” (as the military is euphemistically known in Pakistan), human-rights activists, and other sections of civil society. However, for more than a decade, the Army has found it preferable to rule Pakistan indirectly, focussing on national security and foreign policy, and leaving the messy and intractable problems of poverty, energy deficits, and development to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Imran Khan is only the latest in a series of junior partners whom the Army will expect to concentrate on the economy and other domestic matters but tread lightly on foreign affairs. [...]

Khan’s attitude toward the Taliban has shifted over the years, but his current outlook seems aligned with the Army’s. That is, where Taliban factions leave Pakistan alone and seek to be accommodated in Afghan politics, he is sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, the movement’s legitimacy. (Since the Afghan Taliban emerged, in 1994, the Pakistan Army and its principal intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has sought to use the movement as a source of influence in Afghanistan, and as a check on India’s ambitions in the country.) Khan also describes Pakistan as a victim of the American-led war in Afghanistan. He has denounced U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan and rejected the premises of U.S. counterterrorism policy in the region. “I never thought the Taliban were a threat to Pakistan,” he told me in 2012, when I interviewed him for a Profile in The New Yorker. Still, it has always been hard to think of Khan as anti-Western, in the sense that he was educated in Pakistan’s finest British-inspired prep school, attended Oxford University, married a British woman (the first of three wives), and thrived as one of the first English-speaking global athletic superstars of the satellite-TV age. His Westernness has always been a part of his identity, and even of his political appeal inside Pakistan. [...]

If Khan does become the Prime Minister, he will inherit an economy in crisis, with debts rising and foreign reserves shrinking, likely presaging yet another painful round of bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The economy is growing, with the gross domestic product forecast to rise nearly six per cent this year, but corruption, persistent terrorist violence, and decades of bad government have saddled the country with an almost bottomless list of structural problems, such as illiteracy, sectarianism, and public-health crises. It’s no wonder that the Army does not wish to run Pakistan directly these days. Better to let ambitious civilian politicians like Khan take on the intractable problems, while the generals take care of themselves offstage. If Khan actually changes Pakistan in the ways that he has promised, it will be a greater miracle than any of those he achieved on the cricket pitch.

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The Atlantic: ‘A Sudden Burst of Movement’ on the Afghan Peace Process

This month, the Trump administration reportedly ordered its diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban. That news report came just days after General John Nicholson, the head of the nato mission in Afghanistan, said the United States was “ready to talk to the Taliban and discuss the role of international forces.” The militant group maintains that the Afghan government is illegitimate and that it will talk only to the U.S. It also insists on a withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country as part of any reconciliation process in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not dismissed the reported offer—but noted it was awaiting a formal offer from the U.S. [...]

The reported U.S. offer of direct talks with the Taliban comes on the heels of the Afghan government’s own unprecedented overtures toward the militant group. In February, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered the group unconditional talks; and last month, he offered the Taliban an unconditional cease-fire to coincide with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. If that offer was a surprise, the Taliban’s response to it was a shock: It accepted the offer and ordered its fighters to lay down their weapons for three days. The effectiveness of the truce—as well as the resumption of the fighting after Eid—signaled just how much control the Taliban has over its fighters and the Afghan government over its forces. Not only that, the scenes of public celebrations, Taliban fighters embracing Afghan soldiers and taking selfies together, and a dramatic reduction in bloodshed during those three days showed just how tired everyone in Afghanistan, including those engaged in the fighting, is of their nearly two-decade-long conflict. The Taliban, which is now publicly seeing that the public it claims to represent supports a reconciliation process, has even ordered a halt on attacking civilian targets. The reports of the U.S. offer of direct talks have also strengthened the optimism in the country. [...]

“My interpretation is that the Afghan government sees potential value in a U.S.-Taliban channel with at least two conditions: That it’s coordinated very closely with Kabul and with a great deal of transparency about what’s discussed,” Walsh, who previously served at the State Department as the lead adviser on the Afghan peace process,  told me. “And, second, no talks are going to delve into the political future of Afghanistan without the appropriate Afghan representatives in the room.” He said there is no deal the U.S. could make with the Taliban without “a meaningful agreement between the actual stakeholders who have to live with it, and those are Afghans.”

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The New York Review of Books: A New Dawn in Uzbekistan?

NATO officials have long confirmed that there are hundreds of Uzbek and Tajik fighters in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and many of them are now returning home to their countries of origin. Together with ISIS and the Taliban, these fighters are trying to create bases in northern Afghanistan and infiltrate back into Central Asia. In early March, ISIS released a video in which its fighters boasted of establishing a “caliphate” in northern Afghanistan. Another ISIS and Taliban goal is to capture Kunduz, a city on the Uzbek border that fell to insurgents last year but has since been recaptured by Afghan Army forces.  [...]

Everyone expected Mirziyoyev to continue the same repressive regime as his predecessor, but instead, he has surprised even his own countrymen. Under Karimov, the jails were packed with an estimated 10,000 political prisoners, and international humanitarian organizations were banned from visiting the country for years. Last year, though, a thaw became apparent when long-time political prisoners and journalists in detention began to be released from jail. This included one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners, the journalist Muhammad Bekjanov, who was freed after eighteen years of hard labor. Releasing prisoners was possible only after Mirziyoyev dismissed his much-feared rival and powerful head of the secret police, Rustam Inoyatov. Since then, Mirziyoyev has removed other high-ranking officials, replacing them with political allies. [...]

After years of maintaining an aggressive posture toward its neighbors, Uzbekistan is using this week’s conference to project its image as a more friendly and responsible state. Already, Mirziyoyev has visited all the countries in the immediate region, promising to work with them closely. In March, he traveled to Tajikistan and pledged to scrap an unpopular visa system that prevented family visits on both sides. Uzbek officials have also stopped haranguing Kyrgyzstan for its political liberalism. All the Central Asian states have excessive apparatuses of centralized control and repression and are effectively still police states—with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, which has a parliamentary form of government and is the most democratic country in the region. Uzbekistan, by comparison, has a long road to reform. Only two dozen political prisoners have so far been released, and thousands of Uzbeks remain on a security blacklist as potential enemies of the state. The secret police and judiciary need a complete overhaul, and the press remains fully under state control. The country has never held a free and fair election.

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Spiegel: Two Years in a German Teen Refugee Home

In the months that have passed, the boys have dreamed of having a career, perhaps even a girlfriend. They have dreamed of a future. But they have also been living in fear that they might get deported back to Afghanistan. The home is available to the boys for a total of two years. By the time that period has elapsed, they will all be legal adults and decisions will have been made on their asylum applications. Karim agreed to be shadowed during that two-year period for the purposes of this story, along with Ashraf, Abdullah, Jamil and Masoom -- as did those responsible for them at the youth welfare office. Because of the teenagers' concerns that this article might somehow affect their chances of being granted asylum or that they might have trouble back at home because of it at some point in the future, their names have been changed in the text and their photos have been pixilated so that their faces are obscured. [...]

Even after five months, he often feels like he's living with strangers. And it isn't questions like whether the refugees may have falsified their ages when entering the country that trouble him. He's a counselor, the young men need help and they're behaving like teenagers -- he gets all that. But he knows little about their backgrounds. Counselors aren't supposed to pry too deep to avoid reawakening past traumas. All he can do is observe and listen attentively, Mr. Sameeian says. He has only managed to collect fragments. [...]

By November 2017, all the young men have been informed of the decisions in their asylum cases. A delay of one year has been ordered in the deportation of Abdullah and Jamil because they would face considerable mental duress if they were immediately forced to return to Afghanistan. Masoom has been granted subsidiary protection because he could face torture or death in Afghanistan. It gives him the right to stay in Germany for at least another year. Nicole Cramer says that Ashraf and Karim are also safe for the moment despite the rejection of their asylum applications. With the exception of Masoom, all are at this point learning a vocation. This provides them with a temporary exception from deportation for three years. If the refugees can find jobs after their training, it's possible for they will be allowed to stay longer in Germany.

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Vox: How the US failed to rebuild Afghanistan

The US war in Afghanistan has raged for 16 years, since the US invaded after 9/11, in 2001. At the onset, a centerpiece of US strategy was to rebuild Afghanistan's crumbling infrastructure. This move expedited military logistics and maneuvers, while simultaneously reigniting travel between Afghanistan's major cities. But when the US started its war in Iraq, that diverted resources and manpower from the battlefield of Afghanistan. And the Taliban didn't miss the chance. To date, the most ambitious roadbuilding project, known as the Ring Road, has seen over $3 billion spent on its renewal. And it was never completed.

Slate: The Pakistan Problem

It was also something that gave us another kind of access, which was a physical access of routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, which is still very important today. So the opposing argument is basically: Why are you doing this? Don’t you still need access into those routes into Afghanistan if you are actually increasing the number of troops like you said? If you don’t do it through Pakistan, you have to do it through Central Asia, which is a lot more expensive and requires balancing the relationship and dynamic with Russia, which opens up this whole other weird can of worms. The Obama administration didn’t want to deal with Russia and only did it for a certain amount of time. So I guess you could argue that, because of the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia, they see this as not really an issue, because they can get the material there. This is the No. 1 issue: How are you going to support the war in Afghanistan now? [...]

But I don’t actually agree with the whole thing and don’t think that in the long-term it is a good strategy because of our interest in Afghanistan and the region as a whole. We need to figure out a way to have this relationship besides threatening to cut off aid and cutting it off until they check some box somewhere. Trump is actually being pretty consistent with the Bush administration policy and the Obama administration policy. Nobody found a good way to work with Pakistan, and that is underlying all of this. We have lots of relationships with other countries where we don’t agree on everything, and we figure out a way to meet somewhere—not in the middle, but somewhere, and we hash it out. [...]

You're right, though. Those are the answers. I think that a lot of folks, including Pakistanis often, would go to the United States to do this, because we gave the most money, or we had the most at stake. But guess what? It's not that anymore. The Chinese have a lot at stake now. The Russians actually have a lot at stake. Saudi and Iran have a lot at stake too, especially because of what's happening in the Middle East and how they're using South Asia as their strategic bet to engage each other, and Pakistan is smack dab in the middle of that. I actually think that there are more stakeholders now than there were when 9/11 happened, and we should see that as an opportunity. I don't think the Trump administration is at all going to be interested in doing any of that. That's not really a priority for them. It's the opposite. They want to pull out.

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The New York Review of Books: Militants & Military: Pakistan’s Unholy Alliance

The international community is worried because there is a growing domestic political crisis in this nuclear-armed nation that is fueled by extremists at home and by a foreign policy that involves harboring insurgent groups, which has become unacceptable to the world as well as to Pakistan’s neighbors in South Asia. President Donald Trump and NATO have clearly signaled they will no longer tolerate the Pakistani army’s alleged duplicity—that while it fights those terrorists who threaten the state of Pakistan, it shelters outside groups like the Afghan Taliban, which does its fighting elsewhere. Pakistan’s response is to accuse the Americans of looking for scapegoats, having lost the war in Afghanistan. 

The Pakistani “miltablishment”—a name coined by the weekly Friday Times that describes the alliance between the army, its all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), the senior judiciary, the government bureaucracy, and some politicians—is now deeply at odds with itself. A power vacuum has developed into which has stepped a bewildering array of Islamist extremists. The future of Pakistan itself is at risk.

During a harrowing three weeks in November, a small, almost unknown fringe group of well-armed Sunni militants blocked the capital Islamabad’s main highway and demanded the resignation of the justice minister and other officials for trying to change the stringent blasphemy law and for being sympathetic to the Ahmadis, a Muslim sect controversially proscribed by the state. The group, which calls itself Tehreek-e-Labaik (TEL), or the Movement in Service to the Finality of the Prophet, then ordered its followers to block major roads all over the country. For several days, traffic across Pakistan ground to a halt. Six or seven people were killed and more than two hundred were injured. [...]

The Islamabad fiasco brought to the surface another deep concern: the growing sectarianism among the Islamist groups. For two decades, Sunni extremists have been killing Shia Muslims in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. These Sunni militants usually belong to the Wahabbi or Deobandi sects, or offshoots of them, and these include al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. Their interpretations of Islam are severe, and they reject Shi’ism and Sufism (the mystical side of Islam). The largest Sunni sect in Pakistan is the Barelvis, who have a moderate and more gentle interpretation of Islam partly inspired by Sufism. Until now, they have been largely peaceful and tolerant, and not inclined to religious violence. 

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The New York Review of Books: Afghanistan: What Troops Can’t Fix

The war has gone on for sixteen years, and as recent meetings at the United Nations General Assembly demonstrated, it has become even more complicated than the one fought by Bush or Obama. Afghanistan faces a number of growing internal threats: terrorist attacks, loss of territory to the Taliban, economic collapse, corruption, growing public disenchantment, and an internal political crisis as warlords and ethnic politicians challenge the government of President Ashraf Ghani. But the gravest new threat is regional. At least three nearby states—Pakistan, Iran, and Russia—are now helping the Taliban, according to US generals, Western diplomats, and Afghan officials I have spoken to. [...]

At the same time, President Trump has ruled out “nation building” and made no mention of economic or diplomatic support for the Afghan government. America’s NATO allies now emphasize a political solution to the war and peace talks with the Taliban, but there was no hint of compromise or interest in negotiations by Trump. The only avenue left for negotiation is the Taliban office in Qatar, which has been used for the past six years by multiple mediators, including representatives of the United Nations, the US, and several European countries. Now, however, according to The Guardian and diplomatic sources, it appears that Presidents Trump and Ghani agree that the office should be shut down. That would mean closing the last open access to some Taliban leaders, and it would make any future negotiations with the Taliban movement even more difficult and entirely dependent on Pakistan. [...]

In the past, Afghan-related initiatives taken by US presidents, whether at the UN or at NATO summits, met with immediate backing from European and other allies. This time, there was not a single ally who publicly praised or endorsed Trump’s Afghan policy. The tepid applause from world leaders for his UN speech spoke volumes. Only NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, belatedly welcomed the sending of more US troops in an interview with a wire service. (NATO’s own deployment of some four thousand troops in Afghanistan will continue.)  [...]

In reality, the US strategy offers little help to Ghani with the multiple crises he faces at home, where politicians and warlords who once supported him are in revolt and demanding that he either carry out promised reforms and hold elections or step down. The country is in the throes of a severe economic crisis, and there is no apparent plan for dealing with either the tens of thousands of internal refugees who have been displaced by the war or the nearly one million refugees who have arrived in Afghanistan penniless after being forced out of Pakistan and Iran.  

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BBC4: Afghanistan: The Lessons of War

A former commander of British and Coalition forces in Helmand embarks on a personal journey to find out what has been achieved by the thirteen-year campaign in Afghanistan. It is a quest that leads Former Major General Andrew Mackay to some of the key military and political figures of the past decade.He puts searching questions to former US General David Petraeus and ISAF Commanders General John McColl and General David Richards, to discover if there ever was a coherent strategy for coalition troops.

He reflects on what was achieved in Afghanistan with leading politicians including former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.And he looks to the future of the country with a senior figure from the current Afghan government - Mohammad Mustafa Mastoor, Deputy Minister for Finance.

General Mackay also believes that any future interventions should be based on lessons learnt in the Afghanistan campaign. But what are those lessons? He hears from experts who have studied the campaign to help him consider the role he played and to find out what conclusions can be drawn.

Andrew Mackay : "I think whoever you are when you go to an extreme environment such as Helmand, you are never the same person when you come back. I was interested in considering the role that I played as the commander of British forces in Helmand and the journey that it had taken me on."

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The New York Review of Books: Afghanistan: Making It Worse

Since assuming office President Donald Trump has barely mentioned Afghanistan, a country where US forces have been engaged in the longest war in American history. Perhaps this is because, after more than fifteen years and $700 billion, the US has little to show for it other than an incredibly weak and corrupt civilian government in Kabul and a never-ending Taliban insurgency. Now Afghanistan faces a new horror—as a testing ground for what can only be called a US weapon of mass destruction. [...]

Although ISIS poses a global danger, it has not been a major threat to the Afghan government. Afghan and US officials place the number of ISIS fighters in the country at around seven hundred, compared to three thousand last year; attacks by the Taliban and by US forces have reduced their strength. By contrast, there are an estimated 40,000 Taliban fighters who now control one third of the country and last year attempted to capture major cities and topple the regime.

Whereas ISIS fighters in the region are isolated, the Taliban now receive clandestine support from Pakistan, Iran, and possibly Russia, according to US officials. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has long demanded that the US focus on stopping this assistance of the Taliban by neighboring countries. Ghani has also been insisting that the US help him put pressure on Pakistan to force the Taliban to enter into talks with the Kabul government. The bombing has only strengthened the Taliban conviction that US forces must leave Afghanistan before any cease-fire can take place, and they are likely to increase their military activity in the coming weeks.

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Motherboard: The Taliban Want to Go Green

The announcement proved strange not only because of its message but also because, though the Taliban might issue many such statements, Akhundzada rarely signs them. So I contacted Qari Muhammad Yousuf Ahmadi and Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesmen for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban's self-styled government in exile, to talk about the insurgents' counterintuitive plans to go green.

"The US invasion destroyed many sectors of Afghanistan, including the environment, in a very bad way and for the long term," Mujahid told me via WhatsApp. "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has the perfect plan for environmental protection through planting trees. Every citizen of the country should plant at least one tree a year. Also, we support all actions taken for the support of the environment, including the state's efforts to invest in this sector. In fact, we support any action to this end." [...]

The Taliban would prove far from the first terrorist organization to embrace environmentalism. Osama bin Laden, the insurgents' onetime ally, also lent his support to environmentalists by slamming climate change denial in the Western world.

Of course, the Taliban's actions contradict its statements: the insurgents have involved themselves in illegal logging, illegal mining, and—the linchpin of the Taliban's war economy—the illegal drug trade. Short term at least, the insurgents have only contributed to climate change. Deforestation hastens global warming, and mining can lead to environmental degradation. Growing opium, on which the Taliban has a near monopoly, results in habitat destruction and soil erosion while processing it often requires hazardous materials.

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Jacobin Magazine: Humanitarianism Became Imperialism

The way we remember the Afghan War today is as a kind of prologue. We care that the United States (along with, far more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) helped fund jihadists because those insurgents would later turn against the United States, serving as the ultimate indictment of Reaganite Cold War politics. We care that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan because that failure foreshadowed the Afghan quagmire of today. We care about the Afghan War because it spawned Osama bin Laden. [...]

But this conflict over the future of “Pashtunistan” and the Afghan presence along the line became an ideological conflict as well. As they had done for decades, Afghan leaders appealed to socialist values and internationalist goals to pressure the Soviet Union into maintaining its support for Kabul, while Saudi financing (coming in part from the windfall generated by the 1970s oil crisis) turned the southern insurgency into a worldwide Islamist project. [...]

The legacy of opposition to the Vietnam War combined with the lack of revolutionary progress in the West produced a new kind of ethos among European leftists. Solidarity with suffering people targeted by state repression, whether in right-wing Nigeria during the Biafran War or in newly communist Vietnam during the “Boat People” crisis, came to take precedence over grudging support for either Soviet or Chinese-aligned governments. This was the moment that gave birth to Doctors Without Borders in France and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan in Sweden.

Both groups opposed Soviet intervention as imperialist and, eventually, supported the Islamist insurgency as a genuine expression of the popular will. Their powerful lobbying in their home countries and the United Nations meshed neatly with US foreign policy priorities, expressed most concisely in Carter national security adviser Zbygnew Brzezinski’s words, “we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” But the NGOs also helped the mujahidin directly, providing them with industrial equipment and embedding with them to spread their message to sympathetic Western audiences.

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Deutsche Welle: Why is Russia so interested in Afghanistan all of a sudden?

Lately, Russia has increased its involvement in Afghanistan. For many experts, this is surprising, because Moscow had maintained an apparent distance from the Afghan conflict for many years. In fact, Russia even supported the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban regime. At the time, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai rightly said that Afghanistan was probably the only place where the interests of Moscow and Washington didn't clash.

But a new geopolitical situation is emerging in the region, and it seems that Russia has decided not to remain "neutral" in the protracted conflict wracking the Asian country. The recent tripartite meeting in Moscow involving China, Pakistan and Russia to discuss Afghanistan's security is just one example of Russia's growing interest.

Russia first established contacts with the Taliban leadership in 2007 to discuss the issue of drug trafficking through Central Asian countries that share borders with Afghanistan. Now there are reports that Moscow is again in contact with the Taliban. But this time the Moscow-Taliban contacts are not limited to talks on drug trafficking, according to analysts. Russia, they say, realizes the US policies in Afghanistan have failed, and therefore wants to intervene.

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